Tidbits: Art Bar at Crosstown Arts

The Art Bar’s narrow bar entry opens into a spacious, multi-room lounge area filled with mid-century modern furniture and vintage tchotchkes.

Soft blue and yellow lights glow beyond the dimly lit Crosstown Arts gallery, inviting passersby into the Art Bar, hidden away in a second-floor alcove of the cavernous Crosstown Concourse on Cleveland. Anchored by a clear-top bar under which pieces by local artists are displayed (the art changes monthly), the space opens into a multi-room lounge area, replete with vintage tchotchkes, mid-century modern furniture, and retro decor.

The Art Bar offers a new and different take on craft cocktails. Matching the colorful, creative works of art displayed in the adjacent gallery, the drinks are inventive and somewhat unusual — with purpose. Longtime Memphis bar guru (Acre, Andrew Michael Italian Kitchen, and Catherine & Mary’s) and Art Bar manager Bart Mallard says he likes to keep things interesting, “using mostly plant-based, local — and global — odd ingredients that aren’t usually used in cocktails.”

Mallard lives near Shelby Forest and decided to try something he’s never done: use ingredients he passes by every day. He enlisted the help of Chris Cosby, a local botanist/herbalist, to teach him more about foraging. “We spent five or six hours out in the woods, and he turned me on to a lot of things I’d never heard of,” Mallard says. “Like berries, specifically spicebush, which is indigenous to the South. It looks like a small tree and has a teardrop-shaped red berry that is savory and spicy.” Mallard has been collecting the berries to use in the Cherry Bark in the Spicebush Rye cocktail, made with Michter’s Rye, spicebush, muddled fresh cherries, byrrh, and cappelletti, the latter two both wine-based aperitifs.

Bar manager Bart Mallard steers the inventive cocktail menu, which makes use of foraged, seasonal indigenous plants, such as spicebush and yaupon.

Yaupon, another locally foraged ingredient, is a caffeinated leaf that can be roasted or dried and steeped in water like tea. Yaupon is featured in the Last of the Mississippi Speedballs cocktail, made with Jameson, lemongrass, and chamomile tea, which Mallard refers to as “challenging, bitter, and delicious.”

The bar’s limited food menu, crafted by Chef Raymond Jackson, includes herb-roasted olives, house-cured salt and vinegar potato chips, and a cool, creamy edamame dip, perfect for cleansing the palate. Wine and beer are also offered, but the highlight here is certainly the cocktails — art in drink form.